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Debugging Domain Specific Languages

One of the problems with debugging domain specific languages (DSLs) is that a single DSL construct is often mapped to a multitude of aspects in the generated code or generic implementation. Thus, the classic concept of a breakpoint is difficult to interpret.

However, it seems to me that this could be overcome fairly easily. Simply allow users to set breakpoints targeted at specific aspects of the system. Once you think about this, it becomes clear that such breakpoints might even be useful in mainstream generic languages with non-trivial framework support, such as Java or C#. Imagine, for instance, being able to set breakpoints on a class declaration that trigger when an instance is constructed, serialized or deserialized. Now, I know you can do this by overriding the corresponding methods and setting a breakpoint there. Cumbersome, but workable. What, however, if the feature designer did not allow for overriding the aspect? Imagine such a class breakpoint triggering when an instance is retained in memory during garbage collection, and then some sort of inspection support that tells you what chain of references led to the retention!

Tool support for creating easily debuggable DSLs seems still not to be in the near future. However, I think that even today we could improve matters.

Don't be generic

Generic code is hard to debug. Users of your DSL will have to step through code using mostly abstract terms, covering all sorts of behaviour supported by the DSL, but not relevant in the particular case at hand. They will get stack traces full of abstract terms meaning nothing to them. And they will not be able to set straightforward breakpoints. Sophisticated users may be able to set breakpoints in the generic code with an appropriate trigger condition expression, but that will be the exception.

Contrast this with generated, specific code. This is straightforward to debug. It is, in essence, the same as debugging the code you would have written yourself. In addition, it may often be possible to spot the problem by simply looking at the generated code. If, then, the generated code contains hints about what elements in the DSL-based specification led to the inclusion or exclusion of parts of the generated code, the user even gets a clue as to what might be wrong in their DSL specification. Or else they may have found a bug in your generator. In any case, they do not feel helpless in the face of a problem. So:

Rule 1Whenever you feel the urge to implement an aspect of your system using generic code, think twice. Be very sure that the advantages of the generic implementation (which, granted, can be big) more than outweigh the reduced debugging ability and confidence of your users.

Rule 2When generating code, provide an option for including comments in the code that let users understand the decisions that led to the inclusion and exclusion of particular elements of the generated code. This will make it easier for them to find out what to change in their DSL-coded program to achieve a desired runtime effect.

When generic, think about debugging

Language and system designers should, for every generic feature they add, think about how users are going to be able to debug the effects of the feature. Current SQL servers, for instance, partially address this problem by providing optimizer plan views. This is a great example. They key here is that, as with generated code, they make the result of the generic interpretation of the SQL query visible. Interestingly, they do it by using code generation internally. The SQL query is analysed and compiled into an execution plan (which is, essentially, what gets visualized). This plan is really nothing more than generated code for a specialized low-level data access language. So:

Rule 3Try to implement a generic interpreter internally as a compiler to a lower-level language and an interpreter for that language. Make the visualization of the generated lower-level program accessible to your users during debugging. Design the the lower-level language so it can be understood by your more sophisticated users.

In addition to the benefit for your users, it will actually often make your code cleaner and easier to understand, because analysis and execution are clearly separated. And, if you can reuse generated lower-level programs and/or trivially map your lower-level language to MSIL or Java byte code, you may even get better performance.

SQL servers still fail, however, to visualize, and thus make accessible during performance tuning, the decision path that led to the final plan (see rule 2 above). Which leads to the necessity of scarce expert database query tuners.

Simple tool improvements for generic code

A fairly typical case of generic code used to implement a DSL is where a model of business objects is mapped to a set of generated classes. These classes all inherit from a few framework provided base classes that implement the bulk of the common functionality. The generated classes are thus very thin. They are the stubs providing symbolic integration between the DSL and the underlying implementation language, as well as being the place where you plug in your custom overrides of generic functionality. (This is, as I understand, how Microsoft proposes one implement the DSLs one creates using their new modelling tools in Visual Studio 2005.)

In this setup, a typical problem is that stack traces, for instance those obtained from logs of problems that occurred in deployed applications, are so generic as to be practically meaningless. Now, if only the stack-trace producing code where changed so that, instead of getting

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